Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction. Imagining cultural continuity in the Polish bloodlands -- Part I. The Interwar Years. Musical belonging and its limits ; A civil society for music -- Part II. World War II and the Holocaust. The nation is now a matter of life and death ; We cannot imagine life without music ; We must restructure the musicians into Soviet thinking -- Part III. The Aftermath. Synthesizing socialism ; The aesthetics of loss ; Conclusion. a generation in the shadow of the Cold War -- Appendix 1. Cast of characters -- Appendix 2. Key institutions.

"Sounds of Survival tells a story of unexpected musical continuity across some of the twentieth century's most cataclysmic events. It examines an integrated Polish-Jewish musical community as its members contended with antisemitism in the 1930s, were persecuted during the Nazi occupation, and attempted to establish a renewed musical culture from the ashes of World War II and the Holocaust. Attending to these musicians from the 1920s into the 1950s, the book is a rigorous examination of Jewishness within twentieth-century Polish classical music, and the first to examine how the Holocaust was a defining event for the country's musical culture. J. Mackenzie Pierce argues that despite the nearly unimaginable violence experienced by these musicians, many of their projects and ideals were reinvited and preserved across war and genocide. Thus, he rejects the common assumption that World War II and the Holocaust were epoch-defining ruptures in Polish, Jewish, and European culture, instead showing that the midcentury was a period of fervent reinvention and cultural development in response to trauma"--